Hello, writers. This week I have a question. Or rather two questions. What is literature? And what is literary fiction?
To me it’s not literature unless it speaks across the ages. Which pretty much means it has to have been written a long time ago. It has to contain truths so true that differences in language, culture, and whether we’re willing to hang somebody for stealing a pig barely impede the meaning.
But that’s just my answer, and I’d like to hear yours.
Literary fiction I’m not so sure about.
I always wanted to be a writer, and when I was 15 my mom and grandmother sent me to a summer writers’ workshop, where the instructor advised us that our fiction should never, ever have anything so decadent as a plot.
In college I majored in literature and creative writing. The professors were very kind, but they seemed to think anything any of us wrote was plenty good enough as long as we were then willing to rewrite it from a different point of view the following week.
Then I gave up writing for twelve years. When I decided to take it up again, I wrote a novel, sent it off to an agent, and got a personal rejection letter. It said, essentially, “You really need to learn to write.”
Huh. Okay.
So I went to a science fiction writing workshop. I don’t particularly like science fiction, but I liked the teachers. They taught us stuff nobody ever mentioned in any of the numerous workshops I’d been in before, like how to describe a scene, and how to move characters around, and where to break a scene, and what to emphasize and what to leave out.
They were teaching us how to write commercial fiction. I hadn’t even know there was such a thing as commercial fiction, though of course I’d read plenty of it.
In this science fiction workshop, we talked about readers, editors, and publication all the time. Everything was evaluated in terms of how a reader might react to it, and whether an editor would buy it. If a reader was unlikely to understand what we meant, or if an editor was likely to hit the reject button, then the thing wasn’t good enough and had to be revised.
In the other classes I’d taken, publication and editors were never mentioned at all. And readers were never mentioned.
But the difference can’t just be that commercial fiction sells, and literary fiction doesn’t, because some literary fiction sells quite well.
So… what’s the difference between commercial and literary fiction?
Oh, and…
Tonight’s challenge:
Rewrite the following summary to turn the story from fantasy into literary fiction:
A callow youth (male or female) is the Chosen One who must obtain the sacred jewel of Togwogmagog in order to save the kingdom.
(If you want, you can write the opening scene too…)
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